Spy Secrets of 'Zero Dark Thirty'

Chastain's CIA officer says to the agency director that she's "done
nothing else" over her 12 years with the agency besides work on the bin
Laden case. Unlike with James Bond films, information doesn't just fall
into someone's lap, or come as the result of a one-night stand with a
source after a few well-shaken martinis. Chastain's character spends years
vetting little bits and pieces of information as they trickle in. At one
point she's devastated to learn that a lead in which she had invested
enormous time and resources pursuing might ultimately be a dead end.
"Confirmation bias" -- assessing a theory or a piece of information as
valid because you desperately want or think it to be, and excluding other
information for the same reason -- is mentioned several times throughout
the film as an impediment to good intelligence work.

The film includes various shots of information mapping boards, showing the
connections CIA analysts have drawn between various pieces of information
and terror suspects. Intelligence work is a giant puzzle with millions of
tiny pieces. Sometimes a nugget of intelligence carries no particular
significance when it first pops onto an analyst's radar, but it ends up
becoming valuable as more pieces are added. Vibrations in the muck can
turn out to be significant in the final analysis.

This is why, for example, Russian models and businessmen in major world
cities such as London, Paris and New York are encouraged to cozy up to
wealthy or connected businessmen or politicians, or why Chinese students
abroad are asked to feed tidbits back to the state. They are intelligence
assets who are rewarded on a piecemeal, freelance basis for collecting
seemingly innocuous bits and pieces about things like connections between
people, contact information, business strategy, personal habits and
patterns. Their job is simply to collect and feed into the system as much
information as they can without assessing importance. Someone higher up
the food chain takes care of assessment and puts the puzzle together. It
may just be those few words that slipped from a businessman's mouth at the
dinner table that, unbeknownst to him, end up being the final piece of
something years in the making.

As with the shadowy world of espionage itself, the most interesting
real-world lessons in "Zero Dark Thirty" are a bit farther below the
surface.